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Winner #2

Appearing Empathetic with Personal Anecdotes of ”Poverty”

By: Kerri Scheer of Peterborough, Ontario.

Most responsible, socially-conscience white people are aware of the need for sympathy towards less fortunate groups. It is the pleasure, and the perceived duty, of white people to discuss the plights of others with sympathy. An advanced white person, however, recognizes that underlying condescension can pollute sympathy towards the oppressed and disenfranchised. This is because those engaged in a discussion of the issues may have no personal experience between them. For such advanced white people, appearing empathetic is thought to be far more effective in assuring that one is perceived as socially responsible and aware. Empathy is obtained by “walking a mile” in the shoes of the socially disadvantaged; for busy white people that have failed to come by this experience naturally, personal anecdotes from one’s past can be tailored to give the impression that a white person possesses this coveted empathy.
The best examples of these empathy-laden personal anecdotes can be observed during a white person’s recollection of their years as an undergraduate student. These anecdotes may recount occasions when the white person “seriously, LIVED on” instant noodles and no name cola for days, weeks or even months – depending upon the amount of conviction that the white person feels that the story needs to achieve the desired degree of perceived empathy. Other anecdotes may recall the times spent pulling nickels out of sofas and then making the difficult decision to either purchase cheap liquor (to ease the pain of being “seriously, SO broke”) or to do laundry (that had been neglected for, again, days, weeks or even months). When a white person is spinning empathetic tales, it is taboo for a fellow white person (especially a previous room-mate) to mention the possibility that the storyteller had ventured to his parents’ house for home-cooked meals and free laundry twice a week. It is also in poor taste to mention that Colt 45’s were purchased solely for “novelty drinking nights” spent playing “Edward Forty-Hands”. It is best to verify the white person’s tales as “profound experiences” rather than superficial elaborations, lest you risk the white person’s ability to project empathy, be offended and claim to know what’s best for poor people.

This reminds of an annual event at my college, “Night in the Quad.” Every November, compassionate, guilt-stricken liberal students (and publicity seeking fraternities and honor associations) spend a night (4 hours) in the middle of the inhospitable campus green in cardboard boxes, to truly experience the plight of the poor and homeless. They don their warmest North Face coats, hats, gloves, and (of course) sweaters and scarves, duct-tape their boxes into castles and forts, play their IPods and chat snuggled in their napsacks, and are fed donuts, cocoa, and smores…just like real homeless people! And once the event ends at midnight, they all go off to their dorms and apartments, humbled by having truly experienced the unfairness of life.

Excellent, worthy and accurate. When trying not to appear as white as I obviously am I have invoked the generic puffed rice and powdered milk that my mom switched to after her divorce to save money. Not quite dumpster diving but close enough to the edge for me, thanks.

Oh, god, yes. My roommate is convinced that she’s SO BROKE (to the extent of whining about a 15 cent discrepancy on a bill she owed me money for one time). The girl has her groceries and rent paid for by her parents, has a Netflix account, constantly litters the common room with shopping bags, froofy hair styling products, and mail-order clothing boxes, has a Mac laptop, goes out drinking constantly, but is apparently (in her mind) constantly teetering on the edge of insolvency. It’s a tough life, really. (Of course, I’m just as white as she is, but I’ve actually been poor, and not just in a made-up way concocted for show/sympathy, so I have no desire to talk/brag about it–if you’ve ever been poor, it’s not heroic, it’s embarrassing.)

What about the ‘poverty’ tours where ‘socially aware’ white people can go to all the slums and brothels of Brazil and gawk and cry? (Meanwhile, said socially aware white person would not T.H.I.N.K of going anywhere near any US slum or brothel, but I’m just sayin.)

I have a friend who constantly refers to herself as a “poor college student,” even going so far as to attend a Castro Halloween night with me the year before San Francisco stopped them dressed up as a “poor college student,” complete with a cardboard sign asking for “money for tuition.”

Nevermind the fact that she attended a private school, and nevermind that her parents footed the entire bill with zero aid, and nevermind the fact that she didn’t even have a part-time job at the time.

She was not, however, majoring in the arts, so that might have had something to do with how she didn’t understand how uncouth she was being, displaying her lack of social consciousness like that. Still, even shittier, really, since her eventual salary after graduating was pretty fucking substantial.

Doing this kind of charity work, even giving a year to do so after college, looks good on a resume and it can bolster a career.

In the new USA, there are so many non-whites that doing this kind of charity work(“empathy”), might become a prerequisite for becoming a CEO. Thy key being, that when some asshole tries to put you down as being “White” you can use the charity work as the comeback, and it’s quite effective at shutting up militant anti-white whoopi goldberg type whiners.

I’ve been reading these for some time…mostly hilarious stuff, but Portnoy has a serious hate gene….or is it just because he is anonymous that he feels ok about spouting it. Those of you who ignore him are to be commended.

I’d say that allowing for a few copy-edits and paragraph breaks, that this is actually better than some of what C Lander has done — scarves and health care immediately leap to mind — and certainly just as good as the rest of it.

Poorness is subjective. If you live in a materialistic, yupped out area where everyone drives a prius (sp?) and rent is out of this world, you are either going to be one of the haves or have nots. If you are making bank, who cares what shyt costs, right? Otherwise you might have to apply get Free Stuff From Other White People, who sure as hell, as some other poster pointed out, don’t want zip to do with anything that helps another White- so you don’t get free food, or rent, or jack sprat, but your neighbor LaQuanShareesha or RosaLupe and their ever-growing broods sure do. Besides the general suckiness of them being around and the annoying stuff they do, we really need to get over this idea that we owe them !

The powers that be know that Whites will do almost anything/pay anything not to have to be around this. Helping other Whites is just not cool, unless of course, you are trying to adopt a healthy White kid, then it is all about the poor, White birth mother. Yeah, so sometimes being nice to other Whites is OK, when there’s something really big and neat-o in it for you. Otherwise, just keep throwing money and missions at places that will never get better, that way it keeps all the liberal infrastructure in place, guaranteed ! Tax write offs much?

For maximum enjoyment of this post, read it while listening to Pulp’s ‘Common People.’ Preferably the William Shatner version. Set to clips from the Star Trek animated series. Because White People love Star Trek.

Again, with the reading comprehension and the level of ignorance… SMH… not telling you what to do… it’s your —cough “life?” (eyeroll @ the looseness of that term) — but I really would suggest your not posting here 7500 times a day but actually reading a book to get some understanding. I was wondering how many white people NOT took a bus tour and drove through US impoverished areas but actually cared about them enough to be engaged in those areas here before flying off to Brazil and offering hungry children their tears. Oh, and I’m sure quite Diana did not define her company by “who has insurance” but rather she found the company of the people she set out to visit far more refreshing and meaningful than that of the insured.

ROFL! Reviewer James Bowman said it best about Super Size Me: “Addicting ourselves to one form of self-indulgence or another, either consuming McDonald’s hamburgers or being self-righteous about not consuming them is the only choice we have. On what grounds are we to say that one such enjoyment is preferable to another?”

A lot of white people age 45-and-up love _Star Trek_. I’m 49 and tried to get my sons, ages 19 & 21, into it but could not. This seems to be true of everyone their age.

I understand why this is: in _Star Wars_, _Spiderman_ and _The X-men_, for example, the heros are young, even teenagers. Kids can relate to them. In _Star Trek_ the heros are middle-aged. –Jeff in Houston, Texas

P.S. I received William Shatner’s autobiography, _Up Till Now_, for Father’s Day and I’m enjoying it immensely. I knew that he’d done a lot more than just _Star Trek_ but I didn’t realize how much more.

You forgot to mention the “have not villages.” Whites at liberal arts colleges like to put these on around Thanksgiving. Participants sleep outside in a park over night in nothing but a cardboard box. They makeup fliers, raise awareness, and except donations to go to the homeless. This is similar to raising funds for things like cancer research. This ultimately makes them feel good about themselves: 1. because they are “walking a mile in their shoes.” 2. They are also raising money to help with “the cause.” The only real purpose of this event is for the white people to know that they are doing something to help other people. If a homeless person actually saw them doing this what do you think he would say?

Reading the first two sentences I thought you were going to be “white” about this. You proved me wrong; no white person would ever make a racial comment when it comes to helping other people. There is a reason white people don’t help other white people. White people expect all other white people to pull themselves out of the hole. Take a look at them, they did it. They’re white and they did it without anyone else’s help. A white person would prefer to give money(help) to a person of a different race because “they” are less privileged then us white people.

I hate when white people (aka winner #2) think they can disguise their inability to write well by stringing together alot of words in complex, run-on sentences. What it really does is emphasize their inability to write and convey a point clearly and succinctly.

Agreed. My family was poor as well, and from my direct observation, that condition does not automatically impart nobility or character to its sufferers. If anything, poverty corrupts, and absolute poverty corrupts absolutely; one has to be at least a little comfortable to afford to make fine moral distinctions.

I was having a conversatioon with a white person the other day about the plight of of the Sudanese refugees. I told her that it is sad that these people are dying out of hunger and no one should ever die that way. She game me a funny look and asked me where I am from. I told her Philippines and she chuckled, “don’t you have starving people there as well?” The funny thing is, white people feel like they are so above everyone else and that they are the only ones who should feel sympathy towards the less fortunate. Even emotions, they feel like they should have monopoly on.

I was listening to the radio yesterday and Sean Hannity was talking about how he would buy a hybrid Cadillac Escalade if it came out and the caller was like “I cant afford one of those” and Hannity goes “Listen when I was in college I was driving around in $200 cars and would just fix them when they broke down.” At this point I made the Jerking off smybol with my hands.

At my college we had a group called the J.U.S.T.I.C.E. club — i have no idea what it could have possibly stood for, but something self aggrandizing I’m sure. Anyway – they had an event every year where they would sleep outside and not eat for an ENTIRE NIGHT! This was all part of our school’s “week of dialog” about homelessness. Then the next day there would be a homelessness panel discussion where they would get some local homeless people to come talk, feed them, and then throw them back out on the streets. It always boggled my mind that they didn’t realize how condescending all of this was. I’m sure that sleeping outside on our green, lovely, campus in a North Face sleeping bag is JUST like what it’s like to sleep in a cardboard box in West Baltimore.

You’re right, this whole article is right… white people shouldn’t even PRETEND to care. It’s down right embarrassing. No rich white person could ever understand what it’s like to be poor, to go without. They should stop this whole charade and just ignore the poor people. Pretending to care about them is just so… condensending.

Everyone is quick to point the finger, but I don’t see any of you accusers and nay-sayers coming up with an alternative.

There’s a difference between “poor” and “cheap” – specifically, the presence of a pot of available money to keep the person from starving.

Poor is eating ramen at the end of the month when the food stamps run out. Cheap is eating ramen when you don’t want to work in college or as an indie young’un, and don’t want to bug your parents for money.

It’s paid for with student loans that will haunt you for the rest of your life….why would I want to pay $8 a meal when I can pay $4.25 for a 12″ pizza (back in 1988) that would be two meals….or generic canned vegetables and fresh meat from the supermarket, or a pound of spaghetti and a jar of sauce that would be good for 2-4 meals?

Uhh, some of us white people actually HAVE been poor. Believe it or not. When I was a kid, my mom raised me on $12,000 a year. Most of that was spent on rent, leaving very little for food, and nothing at all for clothes etc. Unfortunately, since I was a poor white kid rather than a poor black kid, I couldn’t get the government to pay for my college education. Thus, 10 years later, I’m still trying to pay it off and I have a long way to go yet.

And, obviously, this isn’t just me. Traveling across the country, I see swaths of white people living in trailer parks. They don’t look very wealthy to me. Well, maybe they’re not considered culturally “white” by the writer(s) of this blog. Perhaps one has to be wealthy to be REALLY white.

Oh, and, to this day I find it amusing that so many black kids with shiny new $150 sneakers are considered “poor,” and yet I, formerly a white kid with the cheapest of sneakers worn till the soles were falling off, was never considered “poor,” since, after all, I was white, so how could I possibly be poor…

So here we are bragging about how poor we are or have been. What a bunch of bull shit, every one of you is a god damn lier. “I was so poor I ate corn cobs to keep my stomach from cramping with hunger pains.” “I was so poor I ate dirt so my shit would be black”. Blah, blah, blah, will it ever end. You people are full of it. If you were really poor you wouldn’t be talking about it, I know and I know others who know. What you say is, “I know what poor is; I’ve been there”. End of story.

Thank you. So much for this observation. Also, thank you for being from Peterborough, the home of Peterborough Coalition Against Poverty, an organization composed almost entirely of privileged undergraduates.

I’ve noticed that white people who were not raised in poverty are the most likely to give someone who has finally landed a decent job crap for “selling out.” People who actually have been poor think it’s great. Poverty is not a lifestyle choice. It’s something that happens to you and it sucks.

And if a real homeless person had wandered onto campus, they’d have called security. My college had one of these stupid events, too – I wrote a column in that week’s newspaper about how hypocritical and useless a gesture it was, and had people screaming at me on the sidewalk. True story. Good times.

This is probably the most spot-on item I’ve seen posted to this blog so far. I am white and it pisses me off, this pathetic “pissing contest” amongst wealthy whites about who has ‘experienced’ or ‘seen’ more actual poverty/harshness etc.

The worst part is the projection as a status marker.

I think part of it stems from our safe, protected, plastic-y urban silver-spoon lives … we long for something more “real” and “hardcore”. Hence also the tendency to buy products like ‘ghetto boots’ or ‘ghetto clothing’ for silver-spoon teens etc. to express their “hardcore-ness”.

If you watch Steve Jobs’s “motivational” commencement speech at Stanford, he gives a great example of this when he dropped out of Reed College and lived on couches in his friends’ dorms and scrapped around for food.

Ha, ha, ha! My parents just sent me the exact amount of money to stay broke, good thing I had a washer and dryer at my place… which at first I didn’t have. Living off Rramen and eggs was a definitely kinda funny, yet challenge though!

Well, if you could have bought me the gasoline and given me a free day to visit my mother I would have been for it.
Let’s just say that in college I learned that water is good for hiding hunger and that one can go for several says without eating if one drinks water regularly. When an economics textbook used examples of college students budgeting trips to starbucks, I laughed loudly at the notion that a trip to starbucks was anything but a very rare luxury.

hilarious! i haven’t searched through the site to find anything about stores like Abercrombie & Fitch, but i’d like to add the observation that white people also like to wear scruffy vintage “looking” (i.e. faded, frayed, sanded) clothes that actually cost one month’s worth of groceries per item. i’m in california, where this look was very popular with wealthy (or wannabe wealthy) white and asian people. i never really understood why you’d want to buy used and dirty looking sweatshirt for $90.

i remember “homeless” white kids on Telegraph Ave. in Berkeley who heckled college students (like myself) for change…they were rumored to be posers from the mansions in Berkeley Hills. i knew this was true from the $5,000 purebred dogs they often had in their company.

Yeah! The one incompatible with my vegetarian ways.
I took advantage of it when I could, and I remember being pleased when I found out the uni always offered a vegetarian option in every cafeteria for every meal. Then the exotic looking names that I saw on a couple of the menus online turned out to be the same 3 dishes in constant rotation and they weren’t even that good.
BUT
the stuff like having to live off of water for several days at a time didn’t come until I moved out. The fact that the food services were shut down over the holidays didn’t help when I lived in the dorms either.

Actually “poor Black kids” don’t get any more government college financial aid than you do if you’re white from a similar income background. Race has nothing to do with it. You sure do sound like an ignorant racist, though.

Yeah… these people really “did it without anyone else’s help” it’s not like they didn’t have a long list of invisible benefits behind them. It’s not like they could just say to themselves with confidence:

___1. I can arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.
___ 2. I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed
or harassed.
___ 3. I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my
race widely represented.
___ 4. When I am told about our national heritage or about “civilization,” I am shown that people
of my color made it what it is.
___ 5. I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the
existence of their race.
___ 6. I can go into a music shop and count on finding the music of my race represented, into a
supermarket and find the food I grew up with, into a hairdresser’s shop and find someone
who can deal with my hair.
___ 7. Whether I use checks, credit cards, or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work
against the appearance of financial responsibility.
___ 8. I am not made acutely aware that my shape, bearing, or body odor will be taken as a
reflection on my race.
___ 9. I can worry about racism without being seen as self-interested or self-seeking.
___ 10. I can take a job or enroll in a college with an affirmative action policy without having my
co-workers or peers assume I got it because of my race.
___ 11. I can be late to a meeting without having the lateness reflect on my race.
___ 12. I can choose public accommodation with out fearing that people of my race cannot get in
or will be mistreated.
___ 13. I am never asked to speak for all of the people of my racial group.
___ 14. I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk with the “person in charge” I will be facing a
person of my race.
___ 15. If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven’t
been singled out because of my race.
___ 16. I can easily by posters, postcards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys, and
children’s magazines featuring people of my race.
___ 17. I can choose blemish cover or bandages in “flesh” color and have them more or less match
my skin.
___ 18. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.
___ 19. I can walk into a classroom and know I will not be the only member of my race.
___ 20. I can enroll in a class at college and be sure that the majority of my professors will be of
my race.

Since when has Ken Burns been “deeply concerned”? When he made his recent “The War” series about WWII he completely left out Latino Americans, despite the fact that they are the most highly decorated ethnic group from WWII. Ken Burns is too busy making docs about baseball, jazz, the Civil War, and other white person fetishes to be “concerned”.

See, I never know how to answer those kinds of things. I’m a non-White person disguised as a White person.

So if you know me or see my driver’s license, you know I’m a mix of races and can put several different things down.

But in a crowded mall? Everyone thinks I’m just another White girl.

It’s easy to assume everyone looks like one racial group or another and belongs to that particular group.

It isn’t true, of course, but it’s easy to think. And looking White does provide benefits.

I have a dear friend who can’t pass, but her sisters all can. She’s had a harder time her entire life, even though she’s the smartest of her siblings.

When we’re together, I wonder sometimes what race or races other people think we’re are. (My genetic medly and hers only intersect on a few White ancestors. . .but we look enough alike to be lumped together when we want to be.)

Still, listening to Whites. . .I bite my tongue a lot. Or I hold my laughter in until the White in question is gone.

There are also the white people who think a summer spent doing “good work” somewhere means they now totally relate to that less-priviledged area and know all about its problems.

I grew up in Appalachia and when I was in my 20s and mentioned that, it never failed to get all sorts of comments from people who “had a cousin whose best friend worked in a program with Appalachian kids one month” and so they really really thought they understood where I came from. NOT.

“No rich white person could ever understand what it’s like to be poor, to go without. ”

You don’t think some rich white people started out poor. MANY have. My mom is one of them, and she knows about going without. Plenty of people where I come from — a place where rich and poor live side by side — had nothing when they were children and became very wealthy in their 30s and 40s..

no shit. not that there’s anything wrong with going on mission trips but dayum! and notice how those same people love to experience blow and hemp, failing to realize that the 10 year old kids who have to grow the stuff in appalachia or colombia or wherever it comes from get beaten and shot et cetera…so that those privileged students on a mission trip can have a good time (no offense to pot smokers, of course, unless you like being offended wink wink :))

yeah i read that too and also that thing with him going to jail, it was a one-room jailhouse with no other inmates. plus it was during the hot humid summer, and the jailhouse was cool and dark..what a pussy 🙂

for two years of high school i went to a catholic, all girls, 95% white private school in which we were taught to love all people and treat all races equally. i pretty much had the idea that racism doesn’t exist anymore. then i transferred to a public school and oh my god IT DOES!

Thats because people not raised in poverty were given more of a luxury to cultivate themselves, develop their creativity, go after their desires, and so on. That’s what they come to value in life and would give up money before giving that up.

brilliant. i have heard the ramen story so many times. uh oh, I guess that means that people are trying to empathize with me because they think I’m poor. Maybe I should stop wearing my $200 ripped jeans; they may be a little too authentic ;-P

sounds like this time i had an ethics class in college and we were debating child labour.
this girl who went to mexico (for spring break or something)raised her hand and said that with her experience in a third world country and seeing the poverty and children working was bad and that there shouldn’t be child labour allowed.
i made a comment about being born in an actual developing country and to choose between working as a kid in a factory or selling your body in the streets, what option would you take to support your family?

Although I often felt “poor” in college, it was usually because I wanted to go out shopping or to dinner and drinks and didn’t have the money to splurge. But I never considered myself actually poor because I knew I’d always have a roof over my head and food to eat–thank mom and dad! Also, once while chatting w/my best friend and her boyfriend he was telling us how he didn’t have parents to rely on and how his refrigerator broke once and he had to sell his entire CD collection to buy a new one and replace all his food. We thought that really sucked for him because we were never in a situation like that. Although he still wasn’t really “poor” considering he had a CD collection.

I’m an archaeologist and I travel around a bit. The two poorest countries I’ve been to are Peru and Turkmenistan. Turkmenistan is very poor. And I will never say I “understand” what it’s like, because I was there as a “rich white American” and could afford whatever I wanted because people make $2.00 a day there. And although conditions weren’t always pleasant, I had a bed, I had a toilette, and yeah I bathed in canal water, but I was no way living a life like the locals and could go to the one good and “expensive” (by local standards) restaurant in town and live “the good life”. Being there, next to it, isn’t the same as living it. And anyone who thinks it is, is stupid.

I feel so bad for you. Damn colored people taking advanatge to a poor white boy! You are so white you don’t even know it. Do you know what I would do to be white so I can have all the privilege you have? You are WHITE, and being white is all you need to get ahead in this country, or in this world for that matter. Take advantage of your whiteness, it is your greatest weapon.

thank you so much for a very accurate and compassionate observation. Where I am from we were considered rich. We had food on the table every meal, we went to a private school, and once in a blue moon can splurge to go see a movie. When I moved here in America, I realized how poor we actually were. I thought, if we were so poor compared to the poor people here, it breaks my heart what it must be like to actually be poor where I am from.

Count your blessings, for people don’t eat for days in other parts of the world.

Some say being poor is relative, but being poor around fairly rich people blows. Yeah, Ok, maybe it isn’t like Appalachia or the black ghetto but when people in a different tax bracket mistake you for one of them, and then start the pressure (pressure to you, to them no big deal) suggesting all these camps your kid could go to for summer or what upscale organic grocer has stuff you should bring to your kid’s class for a special day (“sooo much better than cupcakes, n’cest pas?”), it really sucks. This unfortunate event happens when the housing market skyrockets, all the old residents bail at it’s peak for Idaho, and the new people who come in assume anyone still standing is one of them. do these people ever talk about anything except their latest acquisition, be it shoes, patio furniture, food or property?
They care about ‘diversity’ and other vague ideologies, but this type is NOT all about ‘love thy neighbor’. If you have a real problem , you sure as hell don’t want to go to one of them, you’re much better off going to another person maybe not-quite-as-screwed as you are than someone well-equipped to truly help you. Not that I have. Not that I would (go to them). No way.It simply isn’t ‘done’ in have-a-nice-day (but not as nice as mine) land.
They give at the grocery when the clerk solicits them for donations for whatever illness, they may write fat checks at Christmas, but if they catch a whiff of someone they might even peripherally know having hard times, these types avoid them like the plague, and this could be any trouble, not only financial. You’re only as good as your hairdo, clothes or organic bran muffin to these people.

i never once heard the ramen noodle cliche used to invoke empathy, rather it is just a rite of passage. hey-when you are not working, paying 40k a year in tuition, and whether or not parents are helping out; it puts a dent in the pockets—no matter what tax bracket you fall under. obviously by being white and growing up middle class, i’m not on par with someone growing up in a mud hut, but to suggest that we are trying to invoke these feelings as some sort of badge of honor is pretty far fetched—-you do it amongst your peers because they can relate. i know me not being able to run the AC as much as I want because money is tight isn’t in comparison to the guy in ghana who has to take dumps in a hole in a field, but i’m still going to complain about it. we get it.

This is the most racist website I have read in a while. I guess we should start a website about black people liking fried chicken, watermelon, and welfare checks. These websites are the reason that racism still exist and you are a stupid pig for putting it out there. All white people are not alike, just as all black are not just alike. We hate black people like that!!!

P.S. There is such a thing as poor white people, haven’t you ever heard of poor white trash?

So that picture you have is from a website on Freegan living. The article doesn’t talk at all about the ideas or beliefs behind Freeganism or why people do it. Maybe the author should address it if they are going to use a picture from the website.

Wow! LOL glad to see I’m not the only one finding this bs about what white people like as racism.
I especially like the comment from Janny Hendrix you would prob sue us if we (white people) wrote a book about any other race..like you have done!
I’ve been to the bottom and could write a book like yours about another race. I wouldn’t dare because unlike you and the author of this dumb book I don’t want to carry racism on and on and on and on and on!

This post is the best I have seen on this site so far. I completely relate because I was like that in college when I had it soooo hard. Little did I know of the hardship of follow when trying to get by with an arts degree…sigh.

I think the point is well proved by the picture. I am sure there are a number of people who believe wholeheartedly in the Freeganism movement. Would love to know how many people have tried it for a few days and quit… too bad we can’t find that statistic – would make it up – but I am not white. Don’t get mad that people wrap themselves up in your cause to feel like they are ‘connected’ to poverty, just to drop it days earlier. Other races don’t have this problem – they actually need to find things for free or they starve.

develop a sense of humor.
UNLIKE black people, white people have not had racist anecdotes and stereotypes circulated about their race on an institutional level for hundreds of years, so it’s not like you have a history of rage to stand on here.
This website is a work of postmodern brilliance, in applying stereotypes about the majority it seems to allow us to laugh at ourselves (you obviously excluded) while dismantling the power of racism through illuminating the ridiculousness inherent in stereotyping. Walk a mile and laugh while you do it.
No one needs to publish a book on black stereotypes because the are well known and circulated, and you certainly don’t speak for me when you say “We hate black people like that”.
Honestly, get over yourself.

Hehe, i must say at first i was the same as the person thinking this was racism, but you do have to have a sense of humour. any stereotypes are quite funny, as long as they are not acted on. being level headed takes work, and well banishing ego and emotion is hard.

i am confused however with the banner….fresh veggies are what white people like??????

In my many years of student life (with many more to come), I’ve tried to live on LITERALLY NOTHING but canned tuna or sweet potatoes (they have anti-oxidants, you know), but as soon as I mention it to my grandparents, they send me a cheque. Even though I’m in my 30s. What can I do?

I did find it amusing to discover, at some point in my mid-20s, that according to the Canadian government I’ve been living “below the poverty level” since I left home. WTF is the standard of living in Canada that you can be *below the poverty level* and still always have a roof over your head, heat, water, electricity, food (even though most of it is oatmeal), and clothes?

I agree with the person who said “Most of the observations on this site seem to apply primarily to a certain type of white person–viz. an upper middle class leftist secular “liberal.”” I come from a family that was living below poverty level for generations, including members of my generation. My father worked in the fields as a kid, and only went to college because of the GI bill. When it was my turn, I benefitted from the fact that college was not a foreign concept for me, but still had to pay my own way by working several jobs, taking out loans, and doing my first few years at community college. I think a lot of the humor on this site is dead-on, but I can’t help but feel resentful at assumptions being made about my background because I’m White. I also wonder if it isn’t exactly the type of White people described on the site who is creating this list — and enjoying the luxury of poking fun at themselves.

The joke that every white person is rich and clueless is getting so old.. as old as the white people that this stereotype still applies to. My boyfriend and I (who live in a small 1 room apt) took a stroll on our bikes through a rich neighbourhood here in Toronto the other day. You know who we saw the most of? Oriental people. In big rich houses that are easily worth $750,000 – $1.5 mil.

A good majority of white people around here all flock to boring houses in the suburbs and are in a shitload of debt just so they can live the pathetic “American Dream” of the house in the suburbs, 2.5 kids etc.. and theeen complain that they are broke.

I’m white and have had a chuckle at some of the jokes… but geez, some are SO lame and dated.

Yes and white people often join groups such as the Peace Corps to feel more in touch with the lower classes. Also, time spent backpacking around Europe and sleeping in cheap hostels and eating stale bread is another way white people can get in touch with the ‘common man.’

When I was in school I avoided the Ramen noodles curse by working lunch in a cafe with a generous employee discount on food as well lifting off customers plates before delivering to the table. I also gave rides home to the cook who was an lsd dealer. My gf also worked so we pooled our funds for a crappy apt near the ghetto. I now have tons of money and would givemy left nut to return to those days.

Nice read and very true. I grew up in a poor blue collar household in South Boston. And when I went off to college, my quality of life went through the roof. At least there, my girlfriend’s parents has a washer and dryer at home. …my old man never had one.

I realize this site is meant for humor, but I’m amazed at how many minorities overlook the fact that there are actually poor…very poor…white families on this earth. They just happen to live out their poverty stricken days in rural areas where the possibility of someone reaching out a hand or starting a socially supportive project, or volunteers reaching our, or a soup kitchen opening it’s doors are nil. I’m not saying either group has it better than the other, I’m just saying poor is poor, regardless of race.

OMG poverty is not race specific. Nor is it gender specific or nationality specific or religion specific. Poor is poor and it is pitiful that anyone would have to live in poverty.

It is more than pitiful to lump ANYONE of ANY color in ANY group about ANYTHING; rather condescending and ignorant. NO empathy for THAT sentiment here.

I got to this site by accident looking for info for a research project…if it is meant to be humorous I fail to see the humor…maybe someone can enlighten me as to how building the race barrier that people have given their LIVES to overcome helps anyone or is in any way funny???